Archive for ‘Native & Invasive Plants’

Do other gardeners have the same problem that I do of finding specific plants? I’ll hear about a particularly cool native plant, fall in love with it, must have it…..and then I can’t find it anywhere. This is very annoying. I do not like spending a million dollars for a bareroot plant in a fancy catalog. And I intensely dislike driving all over New England to look for plants or randomly calling nurseries in the phone book.

But I found a cool tool while doing some research recently for a garden that I’m creating for a client. It’ll be very useful for those of you (in the northeast part of the country) that wants to to find native plants at a nursery near you.

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Poking around on The Nature Conservancy’s website, I found a recent press release about a partnership between TNC and Meijer, a department store in the Midwest that apparently has a pretty big nursery business in the spring and summer. I think it’s an interesting and positive development in light of our recent discussion on how the “green industry” should deal with invasive species.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about invasive plants lately, because earlier this month I attended the Ecological Landscape Association’s winter conference where they were quite the hot topic, and I’m also preparing to write about them for one of my clients.

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For too many people, wildlife in the garden conjures up images of aphids, snails, crows, deer, or other so-called destructive pests. But these and many other pests are part of the native and natural food chain–they must simply be balanced with beneficial native species. (Although there are still certain invasive pests that you never want in your garden.)

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It’s hard to be an invasive plant killer because they can be so pretty, dammit. After all, that’s why humans were attracted to them and brought them into areas where they weren’t native in the first place.

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No more politics for now–let’s talk about pale corydalis (Corydalis sempervirens), a native plant usually found in disturbed areas of boreal (cold climate) forests.

A member of the poppy family, pale corydalis has unusual tubular pink flowers with yellow tips and multi-lobed blue-green leaves. It blooms in the summer to early fall. Its foliage looks a little bit like a bleeding heart; in fact, I’ve read that it is a relative of the bleeding heart.